SATELLITE OPERATOR FACES CRITICAL MONTHS 12/07/2009

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by Helen Gavaghan, Darmstadt on 4.12.09.


Citing the World Bank, Mikael Rattenborg, director of operations at the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), told journalists last Thursday (4th December, 2009)  that severe weather events are increasing. His second significant message was that if the organisation does not receive full funding for its planned follow-on satellite mission (Jason-3) to measure sea-surface height its internationally mandated mission to collect data crucial for climate change scientists is in jeopardy.

Mr Rattenborg said that he hoped EUMETSAT's leading role in collecting climate data would be confirmed during the UN-sponsored climate change talks in Copenhagen this week and next, but that the litmus test would be whether Jason-3 receives funding.

He was speaking at an event billed by EUMETSAT as an effort to extend their contact with journalists covering its activities. Some 25 of us from northern, central and western Europe attended.

The EUMETSAT Council had just made the decision to extend the deadline for funding Jason-3 until 31st January, 2010, and a communique in the IGO's three official languages (English, French and German) was handed by secretariat staff to journalists when we arrived.

EUMETSAT is an intergovernmental organisation (IGO) with responsibility for planning the instruments on Europe's weather satellites, for operating the satellites and ground stations, for collecting operational climate change data and for feeding data to the national weather services of its Members States and to a network of facilities developing more detailed analytic products.

According to its website, on 7th December 2009 EUMETSAT had 26 Member States. For the future, said Mr Rattenborg, the organisation wants to recruit Member States from all those countries that are likely at some stage to become members of the European Union. EUMETSAT and the EU are legally unrelated intergovernmental bodies.

The IGO was founded to provide weather data from space 24 hours a day, 365 days a year without any interruptions. As an operational body the organisation has eschewed risky R&D that might go wrong and undermine its operational role. This operational rather than research approach was also incorporated into its Convention when the Member States added the role of providing operational climate monitoring data to its original mission of collecting weather data.

When I asked if these two roles - monitoring weather and data relevant to climate change - led to internal tensions Mr Rattenborg said, "Our stakeholders are the National Weather Services. We do climate but not to the detriment of weather."

The organisation's satellites are in two types of orbit: geostationary and polar. Geostationary satellites appear stationary with respect to the Earth, and EUMETSAT's geostationary satellites capture images of Europe and to the edge of Afghanistan and of Africa. The polar orbiting satellites view the whole Earth. This week the European Space Agency, which develops EUMETSAT's satellites, will award the prime contract for the next generation of geostationary meteorological satellites.

A significant issue that EUMETSAT needs to resolve includes harmonisation of data from different instruments made in different technological eras so that scientists are not comparing apples with pears as they look for changes in weather patterns and, separately, look for signals in climate data. The organisation is also interested in efforts to couple computer models of the ocean and the atmosphere. And instrumentation for the future will include lightening detection to improve warnings of severe thunderstorms.

Mr Rattenborg and his colleagues spoke through the afternoon in a briefing room which actually extends balcony like, with a  great curving glass wall, in a way that meant we journalists all looked down into the operational control room visible behind the speakers. Blinking screens and world maps were visible and screens and screens of numbers as raw data streamed from satellite to antennas to the control room. There to be turned into numbers representing patterns of radiation levels. Numbers indicative of basic atmopsheric properties.

If you've ever taken a photograph, be it with a digital or a pinhole camera, then you also have captured raw radiation data. But you were not 36 000-kilometres away from your subject peering through a haze of clouds, or blinded by reflections. Nor were you 800 kilometres away racing past your subect at 5 miles a second, switching and combining filters as you passed. And your photograph was not essential to warning towns, cities, nations and continents of approaching storms, tornados or hurricanes. Your photograph was not the basis of national decisions about how to spend millions of pounds. That is what EUMETSAT and its sister agencies do.

DECLARATION OF POTENTIAL CONFLICT: EUMETSAT paid for the flight to Darmstadt, the hotel room, taxi and for a dinner. This copy was not seen by EUMETSAT prior to publication, nor have they asked to see further news, features or commentaries that I might write or edit as a result of following up this visit.

 

 

No Title 12/02/2009

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I first published this feature by Mr Sindhi in my technology series of features, published on www.gavaghancommunications.com. It is published here to give readers who prefer to comment via responses to blogs an opportunity to give their view of screen reader technology and of Mr Sindhi's views.  Helen Gavaghan


Access to the web for the visually impaired,
by Ashif Sindhi*
posted by
HELEN GAVAGHAN

When the internet began to become part of popular culture in the early to mid 1990s I was visually impaired but still had sufficient sight to get around without a white stick. I knew I would loose my sight totally and began preparing for when that happened,  which it did,  eventually,  in 1999.  I taught myself website design and now offer technical support and training for others who,  like me,  are blind or are visually impaired. I like to use the Internet. I do so by using particular software which allows me to access the Internet and to communicate with friends, family and business associates across the world.  I use, and also sell on a commission basis, screen readers (software), magnification products and voice recognition software. Perhaps the most important of these is screen-reader software. Some is available free.

 
THE INTERACTIVITY OF SCREEN READER SOFTWARE
The screen reader I prefer to use is called JAWS.  It is a Microsoft product. The technology has helped me with my confidence and independence.  I can do my weekly shopping using the Internet. I can buy and sell on eBay, and I can use Internet search engines. Technically I am not restricted in the type of hardware I use, as long as it meets the criteria such as the processor speed, RAM and ROM. The technology works with the Microsoft operating systems Windows Vista, all editions and  windows XP, all editions.  Mac and Linux have their own versions of screen-reading software. JAWS works with application software such as  Microsoft office 2003 as well as 2007 and Adobe Acrobat Reader. It is compatible with web browsers such as Internet Explorer and  Mozilla Firefox. JAWS does its job by reading the screen content aloud to a blind or visually impaired computer user. That means JAWS uses synthesised speech, also called TTS, which means text to speech engine. Nowadays there are many text to speech engines available, giving users a choice of the voice that speaks screen content. The screen content might be the words a sighted viewer would see on a screen, or it could be the source code that shapes what appears on the screen and which becomes visible to sighted reader when they right click and select the view source option.
 
Let's consider some websites as seen through a screen reader software - mine, Gavaghancommunications.com and the US supreme Court.  Of the three I would give the US Supreme Court website 8 out of 10 for accessibility using a screen reader and mine and GavaghanCommunications a score of 6 out of 10.  First the US Supreme Court site, located at
 
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/
 
When I visited this website my screen reader read out the following information:
 
The title of the website. In this case it is the US Supreme Court.  That is always what JAWS reads out first.  If you are sighted and want to see the title of a webpage look at the top of the page or right click and view source.  Arrowing further down the site the screen reader next read to me that it had come to an image of the seal of the Supreme Court. Then the screen reader told me I had reached a form field by saying the word "edit".  That tells me I have encountered a form where one can type in some words to extract relevant information.  I am using a version of Jaws with new features  and do not have to invoke forms mode as one did with earlier version of the software. The professional version of the product costs £795 whilst a standard version is £659.
 
To enable me to fill in a particular form on the webpage JAWS automatically switches mode so that I can start typing. The user hears sounds when they encounter forms and when they have finished.  All I would have to do to run a search on the US Supreme Court site is what any sighted reader would do. I would press enter on the keyboard after I have filled in what I am searching for, which brings the relevant search options to my attention. As I arrowed further down the home webpage of this site I came across links and JAWS told me how many  there were and read out the items. To a sighted reader these fall  within the  box captioned, "Recent decisions". In all, on the home page there are 16 link.  JAWS also detects headings, that is those parts of a site that the website developer has coded as a heading using h tags. Towards the end of the website or the webpage JAWS read out that the graphic on the page was the front of the Supreme Court building. To get a better score from me for accessibility I would want better descriptions of the images. The screen reader says the picture is of the front of the building, but what does it look like, what is it made of, glass, marble, stone? There is also nothing in Jaws that says where the image is located on the page.
 
If I wanted to view all the links on the webpage I would press the insert key followed by F7,  this would bring up all the links on the web page in a dialogue box so that as the user I  could arrow down and  use the first letter of the links to navigate to a particular link and press enter.
 
When reviewing this site I then selected a page at random,  accessible from the home page. I chose to follow the link to "what's new".  That is, I pressed the insert key and then F7 to bring up the links list and then pressed the letter W to take me to the link for what's new and then pressed on that link. As I landed on the page, JAWS read out that the page has 47 links with one heading. Using a rival screen reading product, System Access by Serotek,  on the same web page gave me the same result as using JAWS.  Some of the key strokes are similar to JAWS' keystrokes,  so it is comparatively easy for a user to change between these two screen readers. System Access costs just short of £300, but the company also provides a free version for when someone is at a computer and linked to the Internet.
 
Overall I think the above website is presented well and is easy to navigate for blind or vision impaired users.
 
When I visited GavaghanCommunications  the screen reader software first read out to me the long title.  The first heading I come to was level V for the latest issue of Science, People & Politics. Then JAWS  read out to me the other level five headings on the page. The next being,  issue three, May - June, political salaries and expenses, then, making proteins.  The site generally is well presented but to make it more accessible to a screen reader I would want more distinction between links and headings.
 
Finally for my own site. As you would expect it is easily navigable by a screen reader, but adding images would perhaps make it more attractive to a sighted reader. So for that reason I give myself 6 out of 10.

 

Post Title. 12/02/2009

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The GC Technology Series contains features written by myself and others that I have already published on the website, http://www.gavaghancommunications.com. They are published here to give people who would prefer not to write to me at that website an opportunity to comment here specifically about the technology features I am publishing by myself and others on that website.

Technology Feature One
 
Diamond Synchrotron Research Facility, a profile by Helen Gavaghan.
CARRYING MY TRUSTY copy of the Encyclopaedia of Physics, edited by Rita G. Lerner and George L Trigg - and how I wish I had known of the existence of a tome like this when I was an undergraduate -- I trundled across the middle of England from Yorkshire to Didcot. My destination: the Diamond Synchrotron Research Facility.
 
I was excited. It looked in the annual report (2007/8) like a fascinating installation. When I first heard in 2000 of the possibility of a new synchrotron in the UK, debate about the location of the proposed facility was mired in controversy. With such a prestigious project at stake, with all its attendant work, that is not surprising. Each job at Diamond, says Gerd Materlik, the facility's chief executive officer, spun off more in the local economy, from additional taxi drivers and catering suppliers to trades and the hotel where visiting scientists stay.
 
I had touched on the battles in a careers-for-scientists feature that <cite>Nature</cite> published 5th April 2001. How, I wondered, had matters progressed and what did they think in Oxfordshire of the prize they had won?
 
My first local encounter was not promising. My efforts to deviate from my instructions that I take a taxi to Diamond netted the response from the bus driver I approached: "I have never heard of Diamond and I do not know where it is." But he was new to the area. I retreated. To the taxi rank. They had heard of Diamond. It turns out to be near Harwell, which I knew of as the UK's first nuclear establishment, and which is now home to much other UK-based science.
 
Diamond is the UK's newest and, arguably, most prestigious piece of scientific kit. One specially designed for revealing the structure of biological and physical matter. It is far from complete, but it is operational.
 
This powerhouse of research looks like a UFO has landed in the Oxfordshire countryside. Low rise, vast, circular and symmetrical, gleaming a polished shining gray. The numbers for the machine's circumference fall out of the equations for synchrotron radiation of a particular energy level. One of those things, says Materlik, that is no great secret. Just something you know or can calculate if you are a physicist dealing with synchrotrons - "part of their" global commons. The sort of thing chatted about over coffee without thought or need for peer -reviewed publication. But, as always with science, and, as someone said as I toured Diamond, what is trivia today was once hard science.
 
Diamond accelerates electrons to close to the speed of light then injects them into a giant toroid that confines them, physically and with magnets, to a circular path. As the electrons' velocity changes on their way round the toroid electromagnetic radiation is emitted. In places, specially designed magnets modulate the electrons' movement so that the wavelength of the radiation they emit is a controlled coherent beam. That controlled beam of radiation - finer that a human hair - is guided down a "beamline" to an experimental hutch, where it is used as an experimental tool. More  electromagnetic tweaking than varying wavelength alone turns the beams on different beamlines into a particularly sophisticated tool kit that allows experimenters to exploit the interactions between the beams' physical properties and those of any sample placed in their pathway to learn something of the structure and dynamics of the sample.
 
For example, inserting a crystal of a human protein in the beamline gives a pattern of scattered radiation on a photographic plate that can be used to work out what structure could have caused that pattern. And now that the era of petabyte computing is here - a petabyte is a kilobyte of terabytes - enough data can be stored to  sample a dynamic systems. Observing the fine detail of the timing of molecular dynamics still lies just beyond reach, says Materlik.
 
 
GERD MATERLIK AND SYNCHROTRONS
Materlik first became a director of a synchrotron research facility 25 years ago in Hamburg, Germany at the Daisy synchrotron. His enthusiasm for synchrotron research was sparked as a Ph.D student in 1973 when he listened to a talk given by a Catalan scientist and went away to read some key papers. He realised then that in his electrodynamic work as a student he had already learned about synchrotron radiation. At that time synchrotrons were still being used in parasitic mode, which means that the machine was dedicated (eV and wavelength output) to one user and other interested users had to work as best they could with the conditions set up.
 
Diamond, with its current complement of 13 different beamlines, is certainly not of this parasitic kind. In addition to extending from X-ray to infrared the  experimental hutch where the beamlines end enables samples to be investigated by spectroscopy as well as scattering (diffraction).
 
Development of the facility is divided into three phases. The first phase is complete and comprises 13 beams. At the end of phase two a further nine beams will have been added, three or four of them this year. And under discussion now is the funding for a further 10 in phase three of the project.
 
The facility is a collaboration between government (86 per cent)and The Wellcome Trust (14 per cent). The joint venture was established in 2nd April, 2002. Thirty companies competed for the contract and the building was erected between 2003 and January 2005. It went into operation in March 2006 and was opened by the Queen, captured in a photograph published in the Annual Report smiling as she met the line of men from Diamond assembled to meet her. The first researchers, writes Materlik in the Company's annual report, arrived in January 2007.
 
Diamond is mainly for academic users, but industrial users such as British Aerospace are also bidding for time on the beamlines. The policy is that overall the facility is 90 per cent for academia and 10 per cent for industry. No single beamline can allocate more than 30 per cent of its time to industry. Changing that policy would require a board decision, says Materlik.
 
Competition for time on the beamlines is intense and part of Diamond's outreach locally is to pose tough questions to local teenagers to give them a sense of what the facility does and why.
 
Participating students are not expected to discuss the science but issues such as how many people might the research benefit. "...they may decide that proposals that benefit more people a small amount are better than proposals that benefit a small number of people a great deal,- says the material with the case studies. Three of the proposals handed out are: the case for finding the structure of bird flu (H5N1) to design a vaccine to protect people from a new flu pandemic; looking at the structure of potential new anti-retroviral treatments for HIV/AIDS; and improve the foot and mouth vaccine.
 
I didn't think to ask at the time and accepted uncritically, which on reflection I think was wrong of me, that students wouldn't be asked to discuss the science of the project. The way one understands a quadratic equation or pythagoras's theorem changes through ones life in the same way that one might read Emma differently as one understands ones self and social interactions more deeply. So perhaps Diamond's leading bright scientific lights might benefit from an encounter with a curious 14-year old or autodidact from another discipline.

 

First Post! 12/02/2009

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